I'm considering updating 11,000 permalinks, eep

So we’ve got 11-12,000 articles on our site, and have been mulling over changing our permalink structure for some time.

The big problem is that WordPress doesn’t handle this kind of thing gracefully. Our current permalink structure is:

/%category%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%post_id%/%postname%/

And we’re considering something as radical as:

/%postname%/%post_id%/

Or even:

/%postname%-%post_id%/

Which begs the question, how are sites expected to deal with this kind of change?

A lot of our traffic originates from search, so we need to understand the impact and manage this very carefully!

I’ve seen the WordPress Permalink Helper plugin, and while it seems to fit the bill I’m also quite uneasy about trusting something so crucial to code which hasn’t been updated at all for WordPress 4.x.

The alternative looks to be scraping all of our URLs into nginx and doing the redirect from there. It’s no less intimidating, but might be slightly better performance-wise, nginx is likely to be able to process such things and issue a 301 sooner than the plugin can hit mysql, carry out a redirect and issue the same 301 permanent from the layer behind.

What are your thoughts folks?